Tag Archives: young pioneer

Mother gave out her orders for dad to go pick up some of her special bread for dinner. The wide white baguette was the only thing she claimed to be able to eat:

“My stomach is allergic to that other peasant crap!” She, of course, was referring to the bricks of wheat bread that dad and I could devour kilos at a time, given enough garlic and salt. “And why don’t you take the small one with you? Keep her from getting under my feet?”

Dad found me reading inside Marinka’s closet, where I had built myself a beanbag-like chair out of a pile of dirty laundry. This was the only place in our two bedroom apartment where the constant stream of kitchen noises sounded reasonably muffled.

“Hey, monkey!” dad cracked open one of the doors. “Wanna join Papka on a smoking break?”

Before I removed my ear plugs I’d made from cotton balls, I studied the handsome man’s face. He — was my father. Floating above me, nearly at the ceiling, as it seemed, he reminded me of those romantic leads in the old, black-and-white Soviet films: usually some Labor Hero or the best and the brightest of the Party for whom love always arrived after success, and always in a form of the least likely — somewhat homely and nerdy — girl. Dad’s eyes were radiating with tanned wrinkles. His lips were resisting the type of a grin that happened whenever he tried his damn hardest not to act amused at my expense.

“A smoking break? Well. Yeah, sure.” I shrugged one of my shoulders, slipped the index fingers in between the pages of The Master and Margarita, and placed the book face down. (All the reading for our Literature Class I had completed back during my summer at the Pioneer Camp. Since then, I’d been reading everything I could find in my parents’ library, in alphabetical order. Considering I was still making my way through “B’s”, I hadn’t gotten too far. But it took no more than a few chapters to know that this novel could get me into serious trouble.)

Dad stepped back to give me enough room to slip out of my office, and after I wrangled myself out of Marinka’s dirty bathrobe, he examined me head to toe and said: “The consensus is: You might need a jacket.”

“Yeah? Should I wear rain boots, too?”

With one of his forearms, dad moved the tulle curtains and looked out of the window. “Ooh. Yeah,” he nodded. “You’re right. Looks like it might rain.”

I knew that. Lying down on the floor, on my stomach, I was already fishing for the matching rain boot under our bunk bed. In secret, I was hoping that my shoe, of boringly dull rubber, had been lost forever and that I would get to wear Marinka’s pair: They were all shiny, with bright flowers; almost brand new and made in the very exotic country of China. But the dark thing in the furthest corner turned out to be my missing rain boot. That’s alright, I thought. I will inherit the Chinese pair in no time!

“Are we gonna bring an umbrella, too?”

“Nah,” dad looked out of the window again. “We aren’t the type to melt, are we?!”

Shaking the last of the dust bunnies from my abandoned rain boot, I felt a flurry of butterflies in my stomach. Dad chose me! He could’ve gone alone — but he chose my company! The days of his endless travels were long gone. The furthest he would depart these days would be to work on blown over phone lines that connected his Army Unit to what I assumed to be the Kremlin. Still, every evening, the man looked for an excuse to stay out of the house. Smoking was one of them.

As I began to mold into a serious runner at school and refused to wear dresses (besides my mandatory school uniform), dad and I began venturing out on walks. Perhaps it was because my funny predisposition tickled my old man. Being outnumbered had to be an already rough reality long before all three women of our household began menstruating on the same schedule. So, I imagine it was a bit of a relief to discover that at least his youngest offspring could wish for no better occupation than to climb trees, outrun boys; bang nails into drywalls, go fishing or take endless walks through the town. And to make our likeness even more daunting, I wasn’t one to talk much either.

Naturally, I didn’t go questioning as to where the two of us were now heading. Not until we passed the gates of the town’s police station, already shut for the day — its only lightbulb above the main doorway reflecting in the wet asphalt like the second moon — that I asked:

“How come we’re in a hurry?”

Dad’s gait, always evenly paced as if he were marching in the Red Square parade, felt rushed. Normally, he was more aware of the patter of my feet, echoing his own footsteps. But that day, he was moving faster than I expected from our typical “smoking break”. In parts, I’d had to jog a little to keep up.

The man took the cigarette out of his mouth, blew the smoke over this left shoulder, away from me, and said: “Sorry, comrade! We’re picking up your mother’s bread.”

“Well. That’s understood,” I said, then zipped up my windbreaker and got ready to continue jogging, as if on a mission this time. This business of mother’s needs was to be taken seriously. Even I had learned that, by then.

“Understood?” dad smiled. In my response, I had given myself the masculine gender.

“Under-stood,” I nodded, then jogged slightly ahead of him to get a better look at his face. The same grin of his trying hard not to embarrass me was brewing on his lips.

And the lavashes were indeed worth the wait! Still warm and covered in flour, against Inna’s skin, they felt like those smooth boulders from the beaches of Odessa, upon which she, as a child-delegate to the biggest Soviet Pioneer Camp — the Artek — used to fall asleep. After being pummeled by the waves of the Black Sea, she would crawl out and rest atop of them, out of breath and tired out by all that laughter and by the salty water that tickled, stung and got inside her nose, eyes and mouth. The sun, permanently in high zenith, as it seemed, shone onto her like an anomaly unseen in the moody climates of Russia to which the family continued to relocate for her father’s job. And only the fear of being left behind by her Artek teammates would keep Inna awake.

Eventually, she managed to talk her parents into signing her out for the whole afternoon at a time and taking her to the beach with them. It was their month-long summer vacation, for which the family had been saving up for nearly half a year; and it appeared to be one the more exceptional times in her parents’ marriage, when mother was jolly at every visit. She sported a brand new haircut a la Mireille Mathieu and a collection of summer dresses Inna had never seen her wear before. On their downhill walk from the Artek campus to the beach, mother, who trotted ahead, let the wind take a hold of her skirt and reveal the back of her highs, all the way up to that part where during the winter, on their outings to banya, Inna would notice long and curly black hairs, coarser than anywhere else along mother’s body. If ever the wind did scandalous tricks with mother’s dress, Inna looked up to notice her father’s grin, thrilled and shy; and if he appeared embarrassed at all, it was at being caught glancing at his wife with this much pleasure. Inna felt delighted: She knew she was witnessing something secret about her parents; something she could not yet understand, but knew it had to be a very good sign.

By the time Inna would wake up on the beach, however, suddenly chilly from the cold breeze of the sunset yet still finding some warmth on the boulder’s surface, she would find her father nearby, in his swimming shorts and asleep underneath a newspaper. Only a trace of her mother’s body could be found in the flattened patch of beach sand next to him. To console the 10-year old Inna about such a stealthy departure took more than her father’s patient explanation about mother’s obligations to visit friends in Odessa: It took three cones of chocolate ice-cream.

The warm flatbreads that brought on the memories of that summer now stretched between Inna’s fingers and teeth. Inside each bite, she tasted the chewy texture that, if combined with a warm glass of milk, could make a soul howl for the ways of her motherland! The two women would take turns pinching the edges of the breads that stuck out of her mother’s sizable purse, while they made their way to the bus stop; then again while waiting for the bus. Inna’s mother would eat only until a parent of one of her students — current or former — showed up on the platform. She would become all business then, shaking the crumbs off her clothes and asking for Inna to remove any residue of the flour from her face or decolletage. She then left Inna to her own devices, to harbor the hopes that perhaps once aboard the bus, mother would drop all this formality again and return to the repeated game of discussing just how good this batch of purchased lavashes turned out to be:

“Best ever!”

“Better than that one time, remember?”

“Yes, yes. But remember that other time, when they were a little burnt along the edges? So crunchy!”

This time would be no different. While mother chatted up the father of her leading Math student, Inna stole pinches of the warm, stretchy dough from the purse. Out of the dough, she began to sculpt geometric shapes whose names they’ve learned in the last academic quarter. Turned out: a cube was a more cooperative structure. Each of its ribs could be measured by the tips of Inna’s index fingers and thumbs. Interestingly, no matter the change of a tactic, the surfaces a pyramid defied precision and demanded more focus.

“Hypotenuse is a rat,” Inna recited a rhyme they’d learned in order to remember the function of this foreign name and concept. “And it runs from an angle to an angle…”

In the midst of conforming a perfect sphere into an ovoid, Inna noticed a figure of a man nearing their platform. He was coming from the furthest removed corner of the bus stop. Dressed in military uniform, he carried a small travel bag of brown leather. In all of his movements, the man possessed a certain manner of discipline and economy. Everything about him said: order, cleanliness, grace.

“Papka,” Inna uttered to herself — a habit for which she was lucky to not have yet earned the reputation of being strange.

At her school she was mostly thought of as quiet; and being the smallest child in her class, was also considered the weakling of the group. However, she could never own up to the consequences of her character alone: So vapid and wide-spread was the reputation of her mother, she felt she would walk in her mother’s shadow until she herself, once grown, would move to a big city and become a famous Soviet ballerina. Or the first female astronaut to land on the moon. Then, they would all realize just how special she was, all along!

“Mom,” she tugged the scratchy material of the pink-lavender skirt. (How ever did this woman manage to survive in a wool skirt, in the balmy, mid-August air? Suffering certainly had to be a part of mother’s love of fashion.)

Mother, in the throws of laughter at something her Math student’s father had said, ignored Inna’s hand. “Mama!” Inna tugged again, rougher.

With a single look darted over her shoulder, mother caught Inna’s wrist with feline precision, suddenly forgetting about protecting her fresh nail polish from an accidental scratch. Her eyes shimmered with aroused temper:

“What. Have I taught you. About interrupting when adults are talking?” she slowly pushed the words through the tightly closed crowns of her front teeth.

Inna felt her stomach tighten, as it always did whenever she found herself in trouble. The Math student’s father was witnessing it all.

Inna lowered her eyes then lifted them again with pleading courage, “But mama… It’s papa.” And before tears deformed her mouth and speech, she made a vague gesture in the direction of the Army officer, who by now — having noticed the two women himself — was making a determined, yet balletic stride across the platform.